UK satellite telecommunications company Inmarsat has announced a nine-figure investment to boost broadband connectivity in aeroplanes over Europe. The London-based firm will link aircraft to the internet via cellphone towers on the ground that have been modified to point skywards. A new spacecraft will augment the system, ensuring passengers experience an unbroken onboard wi-fi service. Inmarsat says its hybrid network will also support a range of other services. These are likely to include high-resilience communications that can be used by government agencies in security situations or in disaster response. For the in-flight application, British Airways is in advanced discussions to be a launch customer. It will be hoping that the ability to drive connections through a ground tower-infrastructure, rather than just through a traditional satellite network, can increase dramatically the capacity of those connections while at the same time substantially reducing the cost of the wi-fi … [Read more...]

Along with thousands of government delegates, activists, academics, business chiefs and other journalists I'm making my way this week to Rio de Janeiro. The event is the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, better known as Rio+20. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called it a "once-in-a-generation opportunity to make real progress towards the sustainable economy of the future". Other descriptions range from a "milestone opportunity" to cut poverty and protect the economy, an agenda laden with "greenwash" and a "farce". It promises to be a busy time for all, especially for government negotiators. Their job this week is to knock the draft text into a near-finished state, so ministers can come in next week, sign it off and head for the airport looking like they've accomplished something worthwhile. Currently, the text is far from finished. An extra negotiating session convened in New York that ended on 2 June has resulted in a document that is only about 20% agreed; and … [Read more...]

By Simon Driver, University of Western Australia Posted February 13, 2017 08:48:08 Any nation that hopes to have a space program needs to be able to keep an eye on its orbiting assets at all times. This means that Australia has become a key link in the global chain of ground-based tracking stations. The US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has a deep space tracking facility at Tidbinbilla in the ACT, managed by the CSIRO, and the European Space Agency (ESA) has one in New Norcia, Western Australia. The New Norcia station plays a further role as it picks up and tracks the ESA launches from French Guiana as they curve across the Indian Ocean on their way to Earth orbit or beyond. This means that Australia plays a critical role in many other countries' space programs. Right now, about 40 space missions — including deep space planetary explorers, Mars rovers, solar observatories and astronomical space observatories — are routinely downlinking their data … [Read more...]

People growing up under China's one-child policy are less trusting, more risk averse and more pessimistic, a study concludes. An Australian team of researchers compared people who were born just before the policy was introduced with those born after. They used economic games and surveys to assess the participants' behavioural and personality traits. The findings are published in the journal Science. The lead author of the study Professor Lisa Cameron, from Monash University in Victoria, told the BBC's Science in Action programme: "We found that people born under the one-child policy were significantly less trusting and less trustworthy, significantly less likely to take risks and less competitive than those who were born before. "We also conducted personality surveys and we found that those born under the one-child policy were less conscientious, slightly more neurotic and significantly more pessimistic than those born before." However, another scientist from the University of Oxford … [Read more...]

The very fabric of space is not as "knotted" as some theories predict it should be, say researchers. Just after the Big Bang, the Universe began to coalesce into the structure we see today, which in some theories would result in knots or "textures". The warm glow left over from that is now spread across all of space, and is used to test theories of those moments. But a close study of this glow reported in Physical Review Letters has found no evidence of these textures. The cosmic microwave background (CMB), as it is known, is just a few degrees above absolute zero, but it is the minute variations in the glow across the sky that has intrigued astrophysicists. Crystal clear? The earliest Universe was an unimaginably dense place, where the laws of physics as we now know them were subject to very different conditions. The first few instants after the Big Bang gave rise to variations in the dense lump of matter, which now manifest as variations in the CMB. A space telescope called the … [Read more...]

It turns out that sometimes this same "observer effect" crops up in science journalism. The story goes that, right now, there is a quiet debate happening that could have implications for how the Universe as we know it came to be - and what came before. And the debate is being driven in part by the fact that news outlets including BBC News took a small peek into the machine of modern-day astrophysics. It started in a fairly pedestrian way: I spotted a paper authored by someone with a familiar name, outlining analyses of what is known as the cosmic microwave background, or CMB. Professor Sir Roger Penrose, along with his colleague Vahe Gurzadyan, had crunched through the publicly-available data on this ever-so-slightly jumbled glow of light that permeates the whole of the cosmos. They found neat, circular rings of order in the CMB, a feature which would support a theory of Professor Penrose's: that the Big Bang is just the latest in an endless cycle, rather than a beginning per se. … [Read more...]

Red dwarf stars have surprisingly frequent flare-ups, scientists say, and these solar flares' effects could be deadly to life on nearby planets. The largest flares unleash streams of particles that could play havoc with planets' atmospheres - or inhabitants. A study of 200,000 red dwarfs - the most common type of star in our galaxy - turned up many flares of all sizes. Scientists at the American Astronomical Society meeting said that could pose a risk to any life orbiting dwarfs. The result is particularly relevant given the recent discovery that the Universe hosts three times as many red dwarf stars than previously thought. So while the number of exoplanets is rising rapidly, with an implicit hope to find planets with conditions suitable for life, many questions remain about the very long-term habitability that the Earth has enjoyed. Small danger Solar flares unleash bright flashes of light of almost every colour, along with streams of charged particles. High-energy protons from a … [Read more...]

First results from a major astronomical survey using a cutting-edge technique appear to have confirmed the existence of mysterious dark energy. Dark energy makes up some 74% of the Universe and its existence would explain why the Universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate. The finding was based on studies of more than 200,000 galaxies. Scientists used two separate kinds of observation to provide an independent check on previous dark energy results. Two papers by an international team of researchers have been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal. One type of observation used by the astronomers involves measuring a pattern in how galaxies are distributed in space. This pattern is known by the term "baryon acoustic oscillations". The second type of observation involves measuring how quickly clusters of galaxies have formed over time. Both of these techniques confirmed the existence of dark energy and the acceleration in … [Read more...]

Scientists may have seen more hints of the dark matter purported to make up a majority of the mass in the Universe. Researchers at the Cresst experiment in Italy say they have spotted 67 events in their detectors that may be caused by dark matter particles called Wimps. The finds must be reconciled with other experiments that have recently hinted at the detection of Wimps. The results were revealed at the Topics in Astroparticle and Underground Physics meeting in Germany on Tuesday. They have also been posted on the physics website Arxiv , complementing the data of other "direct detection" experiments. Dark matter was initially proposed to explain how galaxies hold together; from what we know about how gravity works, much more matter is required to hold galaxies together than we can see. Many candidates for what dark matter actually is have been proposed, but most explanations have been refuted by experiments. What seems to align best with both theory and experiment so far is a class … [Read more...]

Are the Higgs hunters closing in on their quarry? Listening to the buzz at the Europhysics conference in Grenoble, one might be forgiven for thinking scientists are on the verge of something historic. They have been analysing an impressive amount of data amassed by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) over a year-and-a-half of operations. The vast machine, housed in a circular tunnel below the French-Swiss border, was designed to uncover the Higgs boson - the sub-atomic particle that has so far avoided detection by any previous particle accelerator. Improvements to the LHC's US counterpart - the Tevatron - have enabled it to stay in the Higgs race. At the weekend, it emerged that scientists working on the 20-year-old accelerator have also caught possible hints of the particle. Both machines work by accelerating two beams of particles to high energies and then smashing them together. This is done in order to generate new particles in the collisions - perhaps even the Higgs. Predicted to … [Read more...]

Unexplained "filaments" of radio-wave emission close to our galaxy's centre may hold proof of the existence of dark matter, researchers have said. Dark matter is believed to make up most of the mass of our Universe, but it has yet to be definitively spotted. A report now suggests the filaments' emission arises from dark matter particles crashing into each other. However, the work, posted to the Arxiv repository, requires extensive further experiments to support or refute it. The filaments have been something of a mystery to astronomers since they were first discovered in the 1980s. They are known to be regions of high magnetic fields, and they emit radio waves of high frequency - some of them with striking intensity. "There's a long literature about these objects, and there have been some ideas as to what might generate their emission - but frankly no one really knows," said Dan Hooper, an astrophysicist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in the US and co-author of … [Read more...]

A controversial theory that challenges the existence of dark matter has been buoyed by studies of gas-rich galaxies. Instead of invoking dark matter, the Modified Newtonian Dynamics theory says that the effects of gravity change in places where its pull is very low. The new paper suggests that Mond better predicts the relationship between gassy galaxies' rotation speeds and masses. However, critics maintain that dark matter theory is a better general description of the Universe we see. The study, available online, will be published in Physical Review Letters. The theory that first proposed dark matter was developed in large part to account for mass that, if everything else we think about gravity is correct, seemed to be missing in rotating galaxies. Standard formulations of gravity have it that matter circling, for instance, spiral galaxies, should rotate more slowly with increasing distance from the centre of the galaxy - much as the outer planets in our Solar System orbit more slowly … [Read more...]

Media captionStudy author Britney Schmidt says life may exist on EuropaScientists have found the best evidence yet for water just beneath the surface of Jupiter's icy moon, Europa. Analysis of the moon's surface suggests plumes of warmer water well up beneath its icy shell, melting and fracturing the outer layers. The results, published in the journal Nature, predict that small lakes exist only 3km below the crust. Any liquid water could represent a potential habitat for life. From models of magnetic forces, and images of its surface, scientists have long suspected that a giant ocean, roughly 160km (100 miles) deep, lies somewhere between 10-30km beneath the ice crust. Many astrobiologists have dreamed of following in the footsteps of Arthur C Clarke's fictional character David Bowman, who, in the novel Odyssey Two, discovers aquatic life-forms in the deep Europan sea. But punching holes through the moon's thick, icy outer layers has always seemed untenable. The discovery of … [Read more...]

The US government has formally denied that it has any knowledge of contact with extraterrestrial life. The announcement came as a response to submissions to the We The People website, which promises to address any petition that gains 5,000 signatories. Two petitions called for disclosure of government information on ETs and an acknowledgement of any contact. The White House responded that there was "no evidence that any life exists outside our planet". More than 17,000 citizens joined the two petitions, and the White House has since amended the requirements for response to a minimum of 25,000 signatories. "The US government has no evidence that any life exists outside our planet, or that an extraterrestrial presence has contacted or engaged any member of the human race," wrote space policy expert Phil Larson of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. "In addition, there is no credible information to suggest that any evidence is being hidden from the public's eye." The … [Read more...]

Telescopes looking for extra terrestrial intelligence should re-open within weeks after donors replaced income lost in public funding cuts. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, had to shut the $30m (£18.3m) Allen Telescope Array in April. Donors, including actress Jodie Foster, raised more than $200,000 (£122,000). The 42 radio telescopes, in northern California, search space for potential signals from alien life forms. Ms Foster was one of more than 2,400 people who contributed to the fund to save the Allen Telescope Array. She played the lead role of an astronomer looking for evidence of aliens in the 1997 film Contact. Science Fiction into Science Fact In a statement on the fund-raising website she explained her support: "The Allen Telescope Array could turn science fiction into science fact but only if it is actively searching the skies." Another donor was the Apollo 8 astronaut, Bill Anders. The SETI Institute says the fund should be … [Read more...]

The Kepler space telescope measures the sizes and ages of stars five times better than any other means - when it "listens" to the sounds they make. Bill Chaplin, speaking at the AAAS conference in Washington, said that Kepler was an exquisite tool for what is called "astroseismology". The technique measures minuscule variations in a star's brightness that occur as soundwaves bounce within it. The Kepler team has now measured some 500 far-flung stars using the method. Bill Chaplin of the University of Birmingham told the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that astroseismology was, in essence, listening to the "music of the stars". But it is not sound that Kepler measures. Its primary job is spotting exoplanets, by measuring the tiny dip in the amount of light that it sees when a planet passes in front of a distant star. Such precision light-level measurements also work for astroseismology, because as sound waves resonate within a star, they … [Read more...]

One of astronomy's longest-running "missing persons" investigations has concluded: astronomers have found molecular oxygen in space. While single atoms of oxygen have been found alone or incorporated into other molecules, the oxygen molecule - the one we breathe - had never been seen. The Herschel space telescope spotted the molecules in a star-forming region in the constellation of Orion. The find will be published in the Astrophysical Journal. Oxygen is the third most abundant element in the cosmos, after hydrogen and helium. Its molecular form, with two atoms joined by a double bond, makes life on Earth possible - but this form had never definitively been seen in space. A 2007 effort from the Swedish Odin telescope, published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics, claimed a discovery of oxygen in a nearby star-forming region, but the discovery could not be independently confirmed. One possible location for the missing oxygen is locked onto dust grains and incorporated into … [Read more...]

This picture, released to the BBC, combines the power of Europe's Herschel and XMM-Newton space telescopes. Herschel is sensitive to infrared light and sees the cold clouds of gas and dust where stars are forming. XMM-Newton, on the other hand, sees X-rays, a signature of the violent cosmos and the death throes of stars. We've never seen galaxies [in the infrared] with such high resolution as this beforeDr Jacopo Fritz, Ghent University
Acquired in just the past few weeks, the joint observation from the two European Space Agency (Esa) telescopes has been featured on the BBC's Stargazing Live series. Andromeda is something of a twin to our own Galaxy, the Milky Way. It is part of the Local Group and is a mere 2.5 million light-years distant. Like the Milky Way, it is also a spiral galaxy. Studying Andromeda is therefore seen as an excellent way to unravel some of the mysteries of our own stellar neighbourhood; and using Herschel and XMM-Newton in combination makes for a powerful … [Read more...]

The first two components of the huge mirror set to fly on the US James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have been delivered to Nasa. James Webb - regarded as the successor to Hubble - is due to launch in 2018. After they have been checked, the hexagonal mirror components will be stored until engineers are ready to assemble them onto the telescope. Some 18 of them will make up JWST's 6.5m primary mirror, which is more than twice as wide as Hubble's main mirror. On 17 September, the mirrors left the facility of contractor Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado, for Nasa's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where the telescope is being assembled. Image caption The mirror components have undergone cryogenic testing at Nasa's facilities "These first two completed flight mirror assemblies arriving at Goddard are an important first step leading towards the integration of the mirrors onto the flight structure," said Lee Feinberg, the optical telescope element manager for JWST. The remaining 16 … [Read more...]